Lightspeed Retail is primarily designed for brick-and-mortar small business owners who sell products, like a traditional retail store. For $89/month, you get 1 register and can manage 5 employees. If you want to upgrade to 2 registers and 10 employees, you will pay $149/month. If you are willing to shell out $259/month, you can have 4 registers and manage 20 employees. All plans are fully featured and include 24/7 customer support. If you are willing to pay in 14 month increments, you can get a pricing discount, ie $76/month instead of $89 for smallest plan.

Quickbooks Enterprise (With Advanced Inventory Management) There is a reason I added the “with advanced inventory management” above. Quickbooks Enterprise does not come with the inventory management piece unless you purchase their platinum plan, which currently costs $170.40/month with the deal they are running. You can also add the advanced inventory to a lesser plan, but the customer service representatives I talked to were not very clear on how much extra it would cost, and since it is only a $30 difference between their silver and platinum plans, you will probably be close to the $170 range either way.

Stitch Labs starts at $99/month for 2 sales channels and 250 orders. You will have to pay an additional $100 for 500 additional orders, should you exceed the 250 mark. Stitch Labs starter plan has some other limitations as well. Support is only by email and you cannot drop ship, do multi-warehouse tasks, or set user permissions.

If you want to upgrade to $449/month for the business plan, then you have a lot more features. You can have multiple warehouses, handle 2000 orders/month, set user permissions, use tools to help you with pricing, drop ship, and get phone and live chat support. But most importantly, you have unlimited sales channels, meaning you can integrate with as many sale locations and online sites as you want.

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Lightspeed Retail is pretty simple. Although there is a bit of a learning curve, simply because there are some sophisticated features, after the free onboarding tutorial and some messing around with the system for a bit yourself you should have no problem figuring things out. Managing inventory is easy. You can add inventory individually or in-bulk via CSV upload which Lightspeed helps you out with.

One awesome feature which makes everything easier, is that you can send in your vendor catalogue to Lightspeed and they will put it into their system for you. From then on, ordering from that vendor is very straightforward. You just find their catalogue in your account, click what you need to order, adjust quantities, submit it, and an email is sent straight to the vendor requesting a purchase order. It is really pretty slick. The whole system is like that, including the checkout screen, which is even easier to use.

If you are a Quickbooks veteran, using Enterprise will be a breeze, because it has a very similar interface to the rest of the Quickbooks software. But, if you are not a Quickbooks user from way back, the system will take some getting used to. It can be a little complicated to figure out where things are and how they work together, mostly because the screen just has a lot going on and can get a little confusing. But, with some practice, you will get the hang of it. The format is similar to Microsoft Word, with the tabs along the top for major categories and actions. Performing the actual tasks themselves, like adding a customer, is really pretty intuitive, it is just a matter of familiarizing yourself with the system.

Stitch Labs, at least for me, kind of falls in the middle of Lightspeed Retail and Quickbooks. The screen is a lot less cluttered than Quickbooks, making it easier to navigate and figure out what is going on. The tab layout at the top of the screen is similar in style to Quickbooks, with important categories featured. One problem I had with Stitch Labs, is that they do not seem to allow you to add discounts and tax brackets for specific customers when you input them as contacts, as Lightspeed and Quickbooks Enterprise do, which can be a pain if you are working with lots of business customers.

Quickbooks Enterprise has phone support from 6am-6pm PST Monday – Friday. On Saturday, their phone support hours are 6-3 PST. Quickbooks support is pretty hit or miss. They do not have email support, which is surprising. Their phone support is iffy and their forum help even more so. They also offer live chat, but the hours are unclear. Certain times I was on and they were available, other times they were not, all during regular business hours. But, the several conversations I did have on live chat, were helpful and to the point.

Stitch Labs has support M-F from 9-5 PST. For their starter plan, you only get email support. If you subscribe to a premium plan, then you also get phone and live chat support. Stitch Labs support is very well rated and has won several customer service awards in the last several years.

Lightspeed Retail does a good job with all the basics. You can track inventory levels from receiving product to selling it. Because Lightspeed Retail also has a top-level POS system, inventory counts are automatically updated whenever a product is sold at the register. You can set low inventory alerts for each item, so you can know to order more before you run out. You can also transfer inventory in-between stores. If you have multiple stores and one store is running low while another has plenty, you can transfer inventory from one store to another and inventory counts are automatically updated.

Also, Lightspeed Retail keeps track of your costs and margin for each inventory item, meaning you will always know which products are selling, which are not, and which are actually making your business money. For the average small business owner that is selling products in a brick-and-mortar environment, Lightspeed Retail has more than enough inventory level, tracking, and transfer needs for your business.

Quickbooks Enterprise is built for companies that have lots of inventory and customers, making it a great fit for wholesalers and manufacturing businesses. You can do basic inventory tracking, level alerts, etc like you can with Lightspeed Retail. But, Quickbooks Enterprise also has several additional features tailored to manufacturing and wholesaling businesses.

For example, you can track inventory to specific bins within a warehouse, track by serial or lot number if you have bigger or combined inventory bundles, transfer inventory between warehouses, and more. One other handy feature, is you can set up locations within locations. If you have a large warehouse, you can set up multiple tracking locations within one specific warehouse (receiving, shipping, etc), so you know exactly where in the process chain your inventory is at any given time.

Lightspeed Retail has one of the most robust PO systems I have reviewed. It does all the basics, such as PO lists based on low inventory items, PO creation, and PO tracking. What sets it apart, is its vendor management system, which has over 3,000 (and counting) vendor catalogues pre-programmed into its system. In other words, if your vendor’s catalogue is in Lightspeed’s system, you can just browse their catalogue items, select your inventory order items and amounts, and submit the PO directly to your vendor’s purchase order system. If your vendor’s catalogue is not already pre-programmed in, just send the most recent catalogue (or give a link to it), and Lightspeed will input into their system for you, free of charge. Talk about service with a smile.

Quickbooks Enterprise has the ability to turn into any estimate or quote into a PO with just several clicks, which is a nice feature. Like Lightspeed Retail, it tracks your purchase orders from initial order placement to receiving into your inventory and can create automatic PO order lists based on low inventory items. Quickbooks Enterprise also has a nicely organized vendor management screen, which tells you which vendors you have ordered from and how much you still owe each.

Quickbooks Enterprise has a solid reporting system and has the ability to run all the standard reports mentioned above under Lightspeed’s reporting capability. Quickbooks Enterprise is also able to create customized reports based on various metrics, which is a nice feature. When it comes to integration, Quickbooks Enterprise does not really integrate their inventory management with any other providers. In other words, you cannot track your Shopify inventory on Quickbooks. However, you can often import financial data into the accounting piece of Quickbooks Enterprise.

Lightspeed Retail’s killer inventory management system is paired with an equally impressive POS system. If you have a brick and mortar store, you can manage your inventory, employees, and sales operations all via one system. You can even generate work orders, backorder inventory for customers, and organize your customers and contacts into lists based on a variety of filters. If you are a brick and mortar small business owner that could also use a POS upgrade along with your inventory management software, Lightspeed Retail is the way to go.

Quickbooks, although having a decent inventory management system, is more known for their accounting and financial services than anything else. If you go with Quickbooks Enterprise, you will not only be able to manage your inventory, but you will also be able to take care of all your accounting needs, generate payroll for your employees, generate invoices, accept payments, and more. In other words, if it has to do with money, Quickbooks Enterprise has you covered.